I CAN’T help wondering whether the media should really have leapt quite so enthusiastically on the two unguarded comments which made headlines this week.

It started, you will remember, when David Cameron was overheard declaring that some of the guest countries at his anti-corruption summit were “fantastically corrupt”.

But before this story could run its natural course, there came something even more precious to journalists: an unguarded comment by the Queen.

The prime minister’s observations had not been so very controversial. They were generally held to be true; it’s just that he wasn’t supposed to voice them.

The Queen’s comments, meanwhile, consisted merely of saying some Chinese diplomats were “very rude” to the British ambassador. The only reason this very mild gripe was considered a sensational story is that the monarch has spent the last 64 years scrupulously avoiding saying anything controversial in public.

After all, if that’s the worst thing Her Majesty says when she doesn’t know there’s a microphone about, then at least we know she doesn’t behave in private like Catherine Tate’s sweary Nan character.

Both these episodes will be added to the oft-repeated catalogue of clips of gaffes by prominent people.

The nation curled its collective toes in 2010, when Gordon Brown was recorded complaining, after an election walkabout, that the disillusioned Labour supporter Gillian Duffy was a “bigoted woman”.

Later, thanks to Andrew Rawnsley’s book The End of the Party, we discovered that some people around Mr Brown were relieved that the contents of the recording were not far worse.

That book made it sound as though those few recorded moments might have been the longest the Labour leader ever went without letting loose a volley of F-words.

But while all these episodes were all valid news stories, I can’t help feeling the media should not seize upon them with excessive glee.

If we treat every gaffe as a huge event, it makes politicians, and other leaders, more obsessive about not committing them.

Last year, we went through what was commonly considered to be one of the dullest general election campaigns in history.

Both the main party leaders led highly stage-managed campaigns which involved as little risk as possible of them meeting any members of the public who had not been carefully vetted.

The media are part of that problem, because we seize so gladly on anything unplanned.

Remember 2001, when Tony Blair was harangued by Sharron Storer, the wife of a cancer patient at Queen Elizabeth Hospital, about the treatment her husband had received there?

The footage was so striking that very few news outlets looked into whether Mrs Storer’s complaints were fair, or what the hospital was like generally. They just enjoyed the prime minister’s discomfiture.

Spin doctors are so scared of that sort of thing happening again that they take all steps they can to control events. That makes the media even more interested in capturing the things that go wrong, which makes the politicians even more cautious, and so on, as public life becomes ever more tedious.

The only exception is Boris Johnson, who is licensed by the media to commit gaffes, dangle from a zip wire and shout F-words at a taxi driver, all to amused approval.

It’s natural enough to enjoy the moments when the wheels come off a political campaign.

But maybe when the broadcasters re-run the footage of Neil Kinnock falling over on Brighton beach, or John Redwood trying to fake his way unconvincingly through the Welsh national anthem, or John Prescott punching that egg-throwing protester, we should pause for thought.

Do those endless re-runs just encourage politicians to be more boring in future?